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The Esoteric Art Of Hilma Af Klint

Mighty_Emperor

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There is an exhibition of her art at the Camden Arts Centre:

24hourmuseum.org.uk/exh_gfx_en/ART34427.html
Link is a dead end unless you have login credentials for the website.

and a great report:

Out of this world

Hilma af Klint claimed to be a clairvoyant who was told by spirit voices to paint 'on the astral plane'. The results, says Adrian Searle, are a revelation

Tuesday March 14, 2006
The Guardian

Detail from The Ten Biggest, No 7, Manhood, Group 4, by Hilma of Klint
I can see clearly now... The Ten Biggest, No 7, Manhood, Group 4, by Hilma of Klint. Photograph: © The Hilma af Klint Foundation

Before she died, at the age of 81 in 1944, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint stipulated that her paintings were not to be shown in public for 20 years after her death. Perhaps she felt that the world was not yet ready for them. In some respects, the world never will be ready for the occult symbolism and spiritualist gibberish that her work was derived from, and from which she gained her inspiration. Although the same peculiar beliefs attend the work of pioneering artists such as Mondrian, Kandinsky and Malevich, they never suggested, as did Af Klint, that their work was guided by an imaginary "leader in the spiritual world". For Af Klint, this was a certain Ananda, who in 1904 told her "she was to execute paintings on the astral plane".

Article continues
By all accounts, Af Klint was a sober, well-balanced woman. Her art and beliefs, however, were extreme. Regarded as a clairvoyant from childhood, she was a medium and one of Sweden's first followers of the theosophical teachings of Madame Blavatsky, and later of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophic movement. Her work - and there are over 1,000 paintings - might have disappeared altogether, as the quirky but incomprehensible products of a minor artist. Certainly its resuscitation has been slow, while its value and place are still in debate.

And yet seeing Af Klint's work for the first time, in the largest gallery of the Camden Arts Centre in London, is something of a revelation. As early as 1906, Af Klint was painting abstracts. Her canvases - some unusually large - are filled with grids and intersecting circles, simplified flower forms, gonad-like shapes, flattened cubes, painted numbers, stray, sometimes invented words, spirals, weird vectors, loop-the-loop lines, pyramids and sunbursts. One scrabbles for precedents and connections with other artists, but the references are all retroactive: it is as if Af Klint anticipated moves Matisse didn't make until 1908. She painted watercolour square monochromes in 1916. She made automatist drawings decades before the surrealists. She seems to prefigure painters such as Alfred Jensen and Arthur Dove, as well as early 1980s neo-expressionism and abstractionists such as Beatriz Milhazes and Elizabeth Murray.

But none of this counts for much. What Af Klint appears to share with other artists, either formally or intellectually, also cleaves them apart. There is no irony whatsoever in Af Klint's painting, no consistency and no self-reflection about where any of these strangely prescient leaps might have taken her art. She worked largely, if not entirely, in ignorance and isolation from the ferment of the European avant-garde, and almost solely at the service of her occult beliefs.

Mondrian wrote in 1909: "My work remains entirely outside the occult realm, although I try to attain occult knowledge for myself in order to gain a better understanding of things." Much more recently, the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn said something similar, writing: "I don't need philosophy for my work as an artist. I need philosophy to live." Af Klint was driven in a way that is difficult to deal with. Her art just kept on coming, in all its variety and strangeness, until she died, in the same year as Mondrian and Kandinsky. What for the two men was a generalised utopian spirit, for Af Klint was a matter of personal psychic survival. She must have been incredibly tough.

What is slightly unnerving is that, in 1932, Af Klint produced a number of watercolours predicting the second world war. One, titled A Map/The Blitz, shows a fiery wind, coming from Europe, curling from Southampton round the coast to Liverpool and London. Another map depicts "the fights in the Mediterranean", with a brown cloud spreading over North Africa, southern Italy, Gibraltar and Bordeaux. However, we should be wary of making too much of Af Klint's predictions, or of her status as a revolutionary artist.

In many ways, even her most abstract paintings are diagrams and abstractions from ideas - not wholly abstract, more representations of elements of an unseen world, and of invisible forces. Her art also moved backwards and forwards between the apparently abstract and the embarrassingly kitsch. She was unable to paint convincing figures, astral or otherwise. Simpering nudes and crying nuns were more her line. That said, what arresting images these are. Too often for it to be an accident, Af Klint had an innate sense of how to make a painting, often with no artistic models to turn to. Her best paintings are airy, their forms and geometries delivered with an evident pleasure and openness. She had a great touch, as careless and confident as it was committed. The scale and frontality and freshness of her work still stand up, in a way that many Kandinskys don't. Yet looking at photographic portraits of the artist, we see a stern woman who was far from cosmopolitan, and in whom there are few outward signs of emancipation. For a woman to be an artist at all in Sweden in the early 20th century was difficult enough. To be an artist who believed as she did must have made matters even more difficult.

We might see Af Klint's art and her whole life struggle as symptomatic of an age, a culture and the peculiarities of her psychological and emotional make up. A century ago, the occult, spiritualism and in particular the theosophical teachings of Madame Blavatsky were all the rage. In Paths to the Absolute, his book on the origins of abstraction, John Golding called theosophy "a world of vast, intangible and amorphous ideas". Talking to artists often leads one to such a place, however hard-bitten and sceptical they are, and whatever mental landscape they inhabit. Artists need a strong belief system of some kind, if not to actually underwrite and justify their art, then to gear up their thinking and to influence the kinds of things they might say and do.

What a strange artist Af Klint was. She is being shown at Camden alongside work by a modern German artist, Isa Genzken: they appear to inhabit entirely different, parallel universes.

The best things in Genzken's show are a series of model beach huts, dated 2000, each one standing on its own plinth. Constructed from offcuts of clear plastic, roughly folded aluminium sheet, odd bits of card, small mirrors and all manner of little bricollaged detritus, and set in little beach landscapes of twigs and shells, they are small habitations that recall both their real equivalents and havens of erotic desire. Such places are sexy, as Picasso's 1930s paintings often remind us. But we don't need this memory to be reminded: one of Genzken's huts is wallpapered with porno images of two young men doing something unmentionable. These ramshackle habitations are also bunkers and shanties, wrecked hulks on the edge of the map. Genzken's show is called Sport, and also includes a series of paintings whose sole repeated image is the dangling rings of the aerial gymnast. One thinks of the gymnast's disciplined turns and flight, and of the dangling of a noose.

Genzken studied in Düsseldorf under Joseph Beuys, whose own art was influenced by Rudolf Steiner. Genzken's place, as a woman artist in Germany, and primarily a sculptor, has been difficult. Her best advocate, Benjamin HD Buchloh, says of Genzken: "To have to self-succumb to the totalitarian order of objects brings the sculptor to the brink of psychosis." This is something more than metaphor. Genzken's personal struggles are well-known within the art world. "That psychotic state," Buchloh concludes, "may well become the only position and practice the sculptor of the future can articulate."

Might something similar have been happening, too, for Af Klint? Genzken's work, like Af Klint's, is full of strange turns and diversions. Unlike Af Klint, she is not isolated, nor overshadowed by the extremes of Lutheran thought, or by the kinds of social repression at work in Swedish society a century ago. But life is just as difficult, and who is to say how the future will regard our own beliefs?

----------------
· Hilma af Klint and Isa Genzken are at the Camden Arts Centre, London NW3, until April 16. Details: 020-7472 5500; http://www.camdenartscentre.org

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/featu ... 84,00.html

There is also a seminar over at the IMMA:

www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24933
 
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Meet the Swedish mystic who was the first Abstract artist

The artist and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) never described the 193 paintings she produced between 1906-15 as “Abstract art.” Instead, af Klint thought of these paintings as diagrammatic illustrations inspired by conversations she (and her friends) conducted with the spirit world from the late 1890s on.
That af Klint did not call her work “Abstract art” is enough for some art historians to (foolishly) discount her art as the work of the first Abstract artist. In fact af Klint was painting her Abstract pictures long before Wassily Kandinsky made his progression from landscapes to abstraction sometime around 1910, or Robert Delaunay dropped Neo-Impressionism for Orphism and then moseyed along into Abstract art just a year or two later. But these men were members of voluble artistic groups and Kandinsky was a lawyer who knew the importance of self-promotion. Unlike af Klint who worked alone, in seclusion, and stipulated that her artwork was not to be exhibited until twenty years after her death. Af Klint died in 1944. In fact, it took forty-two years for her work to be seen by the public as part of an exhibition called The Spiritual in Art in Los Angeles, 1986.

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/meet_the_swedish_mystic_who_was_the_first_abstract_artist
 
Very similar to the work of Besant & Leadbeater in Thought Forms, which comes from 1901. Kandinsky himself was attracted to occultism, as were others in the Blue Rider movement. That wave of spiritualism has long-since passed, leaving the work to be measured solely by Fine Arts criteria. :artist:
 
The Art Angle Podcast: How the Art World Fell Under the Spell of the Occult

In this week's episode, scholar Eleanor Heartney joins us to discuss the rising tide of spiritualism represented in art.

Source: Artnet News
Date: 28 January, 2020

A century after her death, Hilma af Klint's work is having a second life in today's fractured world.

Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join host Andrew Goldstein every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.

You don’t hear the words “witch hunt” much nowadays, unless they are being deployed by a certain US President. But the term is increasingly relevant—in a much more literal sense—to any tour through the art-historical canon, where witchcraft, paganism, and the occult seem to be more important presences every day.

This development is in tune with what’s happening in mainstream culture, too. More than one million Americans today identify as Neopagans or Wiccans, and many businesses are riding their broomsticks straight to the bank. In the US, more than $2 billion is spent on “mystical services” each year, ranging from tarot card readings to online horoscopes, and you can find a slew of podcasts on the subject with titles like “Hippie Witch,” “so you wanna be a witch?” and “The Witch Bitch Amateur Hour,” to name just a few.

What exactly is driving this spiritualist surge? This week, author and art critic Eleanor Heartney joins the Art Angle to divine the details of this phenomenon in art and culture. Following an article for Artnet News in which she traced the intensifying focus on artists exploring occult practices in recent museum exhibitions—most notably the Guggenheim’s attendance-record-breaking retrospective of the Swedish mystic artist Hilma af Klint—Heartney discusses why spiritualism and the occult are on the rise in 2020, how feminism fits into the puzzle, and what her new book, Doomsday Dreams: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art, has to say about breaking through a history of cataclysm-inclined thinking.

Listen below and subscribe to the Art Angle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Or catch up on past episodes here on Artnet News.)

https://news-artnet-com.cdn.ampproj...-page?amp_js_v=a2&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE=
 
Making art is like a type of meditation, and it can take you to very deep and otherworldly interior spaces.
What a lovely quote to start the morning with. :)

I recently took a photo of my granddaughter, with the intention of utilising image editing software for an oil painting effect.

I was just wondering...

IMG_20200129_064017_compress48.jpg
 
I like her style. Little bit Kahlo, little bit Blake, little bit Gaugin.
I was previously unaware of her work and there's an earlier, fascinating article, especially regarding her occult influences, also on artnet:

Why Hilma af Klint’s Occult Spirituality Makes Her the Perfect Artist for Our Technologically Disrupted Time


At the Guggenheim, "Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future" makes you rethink what it means to be modern.

Date: 23 October, 2018

I can’t help but agree with all the praise being heaped on the Guggenheim’s big Hilma af Klint show. It’s great, great, beyond great.

Assembled in a chronological progression up the museum’s spiral, the show feels like both a transmission from an unmapped other world and a perfectly logical correction to the history of Modern art—an alternate mode of abstraction from the dawn of the 20th century that looks as fresh as if it were painted yesterday.

It’s hard to quibble with the sheer level of painterly pleasure of af Klint’s sui generis style. So instead I’ll take a moment to focus on why this show feels so right for right now.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.a...chnologically-disrupted-time-1376587/amp-page
 
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